Leaving Holiday Gatherings Early 101
What to say when "I should get going" keeps you trapped on the couch
Last Thanksgiving, I realized my social battery had died about two hours earlier. I said “I should probably get going” at least four times. And yet somehow, I was still on my aunt’s couch, nodding along to a conversation I stopped tracking twenty minutes ago.
My body wanted to leave. My brain knew I needed to leave. But the actual leaving? That part just... wouldn’t happen. I was trapped in exit purgatory, too exhausted to generate the words that would get me out the door.
We’re writing this now, before the holiday chaos really kicks in, because we know what’s coming. The back-to-back gatherings. The social exhaustion that compounds when you’ve got three events in one weekend. So let’s figure out how to prepare ourselves, set some boundaries in advance, and have the actual words ready to go when our brains are too fried to improvise. The goal is to leave when we need to and actually feel okay about it.
Is this an ADHD thing?
Oh, absolutely. And it’s not just one thing. It’s like three ADHD things wearing a trench coat.
First, there’s transition difficulty. Shifting from one activity to another is genuinely hard for our brains. Even when the current activity is draining us, the act of changing states requires executive function we’ve already depleted. Starting to leave is its own task, and we’re running on fumes.